1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to business process management, and more particularly, to a unified architecture and a common syntactical framework for representing context of business process data, and management and tracking of the business processes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Business process management is an increasingly popular area of research and current software development. To date, there is no unified mechanism for a convenient representation of business processes data and data context. Typically, most software vendors provide one piece of the “puzzle”, such as CRM (customer relationship management), invoice tracking, order tracking, Gantt chart software, and so on. Many of the vendors in this area are relatively small companies, and typically the software product grows out of their own initial need to solve a particular problem, and the product is often tied to a particular world view of the vendor.
For a typical business enterprise, it is necessary to buy and integrate several pieces of software—for example, project management software typically does not “talk” to accounting software. Customer relationship management software does not talk to parts ordering software, and so on. Additionally, most such software packages have very limited ability to alter or change the way the data is presented to the user. Frequently, a relational database is used as part of the engine, with the attendant limited ability to manually add fields to the database. However, for most end users, the need to change the “candid” data representations represents a substantial difficulty, and often requires hiring consultants or additional IT staff.
The semantic web, see FIG. 1, comprises the standards and tools of XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDF Schema and OWL that are organized in the Semantic Web Stack. The OWL Web Ontology Language Overview describes the function and relationship of each of these components of the semantic web stack
XML provides an elemental syntax for content structure within documents, yet associates no semantics with the meaning of the content contained within.
XML Schema is a language for providing and restricting the structure and content of elements contained within XML documents.
RDF is a simple language for expressing data models, which refer to objects (“resources”) and their relationships. An RDF-based model can be represented in XML syntax.
RDF Schema extends RDF and is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF-based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of such properties and classes.
OWL (see FIG. 2) illusrates additional vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. “exactly one”), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g., symmetry), and enumerated classes.
Accordingly, what is needed is a unified architecture that permits a business enterprise to easily represent the context for business analysis in business processes that occur within the enterprise, and to provide an easy interaction mechanism between users representing various aspects of the business, and the data stored within the business model.